After the rise of ‘helicopter parenting’ there’s now another way to overprotect children—seen at its extreme in the college admissions scandal

The college admissions cheating scheme that was uncovered earlier this month—in which wealthy parents are alleged to have paid bribes and used other trickery to get their children admitted to elite universities—has renewed a national conversation about just how far some parents are willing to go to make their children’s lives easier.

While those implicated may have gone to a ridiculous extreme, they exemplify a style of raising children that has lately come to be known as “snowplow parenting,” or “snowplowing” for short. As MarketWatch recently explained, this describes what happens when “the parents clear away obstacles to ensure that their children don’t have to deal with frustrations or failures, so they’ve got a clear path ahead of them, similar to how a plow clears snow off the street.”

Writing in Psychology Today, Peter Gray, a professor at Boston College, observed that such parents “do what they can to hide their snowplow efforts from their children, to spare them the humiliation of knowing that their ‘success’ did not come from their own merits.” He added, “Their snowplowing is aimed not just at clearing paths and opening doors but also at inflating their children’s egos.”

“Snowplowing” is just the latest metaphor used to label overinvolved parenting, or “hyper-parenting” as it has sometimes been called. The first and still best-known of these is “helicopter parenting” (which, like “snowplowing,” can be shortened to “helicoptering”). That term is already three decades old: In August 1989, an article from the Scripps Howard News Service quoted Dave Radovich, a sixth-grade teacher in Golden, Colo., warning against being a “‘helicopter parent,’ who hovers over children, making sure everything is done for them.”

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‘Snowplowing’ is just the latest metaphor used to label overinvolved parenting, or ‘hyper-parenting.’
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“Helicopter parents are always rescuing their kids,” he said. “They’re very well-intentioned, and it’s done out of care and concern, but often when I see kids with problems, their parents are helicopter parents.”

The expression was further popularized the following year by Foster Cline and Jim Fay in their book, “Parenting with Love and Logic,” and over the course of the 1990s variations appeared such as “helicopter moms” and “helicopter dads.” In 2006, the author Harlan Cohen suggested a new analogy. Speaking to the Arizona Republic about how parents should handle their children going off to college, he noted that there were “lawnmower parents” who would go so far as calling residential assistants and college administrators to try to solve their children’s problems with room-mates.

Paul McFedries, who tracks such neologisms for his website Wordspy, notes that a similar idea occurred to the Danish psychologist Bent Hougaard in his 2004 book “Curlingföräldrar och Servicebarn” (“Curling Parents and Service Children”). A “curling parent” tries to sweep away a child’s obstacles just as a sweeper in the sport of curling clears a path for a curling stone. Along similar lines, with an even more heightened sense of intrusion, is “bulldozer parenting.”

As for “snowplow parenting,” it came on the scene in 2006, according to Michele Borba’s “The Big Book of Parenting Solutions.” College health consultant Glenn Egelman used it that year in the journal Student Health Spectrum. Two years later, “snowplow parenting” reached a wider audience thanks to the book “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting” by Hara Estroff Marano, editor-at-large at Psychology Today.

As parenting columnist Barbara Meltz pointed out in reviewing Ms. Marano’s book for the Boston Globe, the analogy implies greater potential peril: “A snowplow can rip up chunks of grass now and then, or dent a tree so badly it will eventually die.” Snowplowing, therefore, is “risky business, shortsighted and selfish, even stupid.” Risky business indeed, especially when it devolves into bribing and cheating just to get your child into a top school.